The OECD-Iceland Workshop “Preventing Dropout: Iceland in a Comparative Perspective”, 22 November 2011 (agenda), was the first stage of the OECD-Iceland Improving Schools review. This OECD Review is designed to support countries in the design and implementation of their education reforms. The key objective of this workshop was to discuss and engage stakeholders in developing strategies to reduce dropout rates in Iceland. This was done by engaging key Icelandic stakeholders in discussing international practices and a set of OECD preliminary recommendations.

Participants came together to:

Analyse international evidence and practices that address upper secondary student dropout across different OECD countries.

Discuss the key issues, strengths and challenges facing the Icelandic upper secondary education system, based on the preliminary work presented by the OECD.

Explore strategies that could help address these issues to improve education attainment, through team work.

The workshop was based on the preliminary analysis of challenges and policy areas for improvement prepared by the OECD. In addition to an overview of Iceland’s challenges and suggested policy areas for improvement, international experts provided first-hand accounts of reform processes to address dropout in upper secondary in Finland (Pasi Sahlberg), Norway (Petter Skarheim) and the United States (Nancy Hoffman).

During the parallel thematic sessions participants proposed strategies to address student dropout based on their own assessment of the strengths and challenges of the Icelandic upper secondary education and each policy area suggested by OECD. Final reflections were shared in a plenary discussion and these have fed into the final document “Towards a strategy to prevent dropout in Iceland”.